Thursday, February 07, 2013

Money Is Magic

-- Posted by Neil H. Buchanan

The Yap Islands are famous among economists for their stones. Generally speaking, economists have no interest in anthropology or history -- or, for that matter, in any interdisciplinary discourse at all. (See, for example, this full-throated hymn to the glories of economics and its supposed superiority over all other social sciences.)The Yap stones, however, serve a useful role in explicating the logic of money (without challenging any of the key assumptions underlying orthodox economic theory), which allows economists to tell the story without guilt.

The Yap stones were a form of money. Like any other commodity-based money, the stones were used to transact business, with the stones themselves not being fundamentally useful. (They were shiny, so people liked them.) Unlike other forms of commodity money, however, the stones were enormous. Rather than putting a few seashells or gold coins in one's pocket, owners of Yap stones found themselves in possession of heavy stone disks that could be as much as 12 feet in diameter. At some point, therefore, it made sense to carry out transactions while leaving the disks where they were. A person could buy some food from another person, for example, and then they would both agree that one of the stones had changed hands (even though it had not changed location). At that point, partial ownership of stones becomes possible as well, allowing a person to transfer ownership of any fraction of the stone as part of a transaction.

Much of the now-standard economic story on Yap stones might well be embellished, but the core idea is that the stones themselves can ultimately become irrelevant. A person does not need to see the stones, so long as she thinks that everyone will agree that she owns the total amount of stones that she thinks she owns, and that she can use her ownership in the stones to buy things that she values. The islands' money, which seems to be based on the most physically substantial of all commodities, turns out to be based on a group-think that allows people to say that they own something that does nothing useful, that never moves, and that might not even exist.

Turning to a more modern form of anthropology, consider The Beverly Hillbillies. For those Dorf on Law readers who have never watched reruns of 1960's sitcoms, that show revolved around the Clampett family, who struck oil in their Tennessee hollow, making them multi-millionaires. Every few episodes, their net worth would be mentioned, and the number was always rising. (In current dollars, they would be billionaires.) In one episode, they ask their banker if they can see their money, so their nephew Jethro can count it. The banker, Mr. Drysdale, says that they can go to the vault and see a few hundred thousand dollars, but there is no way he can gather $30-$40 million in one place. The Clampetts conclude that Drysdale has stolen their money.

In my last two Dorf on Law posts (here and here), I have gotten into some of the details (perhaps too deeply into the weeds, in fact) of how modern finance works. The fundamental problem, however, is quite simple: Money is magic. As one of my research assistants put it: "We really want to look into the safe, but there is nothing there."

We are trying to figure out whether the President could avoid default, if the usual method by which the Treasury pays the government's bills becomes unavailable. In my post last Friday, I discussed the possibility of having the President order the printing of currency, as a work-around when the Treasury's checking account at the Fed is empty. I argued that the public's reaction to the introduction of "illegal money" into circulation would be catastrophic, because everyone would start trying to figure out whether they have
"real dollars" (bills printed legally) or "funny money"
(bills printed only on the President's authority). I further suggested
that the existence of any funny money would undermine people's
confidence in the value of all money, because of the group delusion
dynamic that underlies all money (whether fiat currency, gold, or other
commodity-based monies).

Recall, again, why this would be illegal in the first place. Congress has the
authority to coin and regulate money. It delegates that authority to the
Fed. Congress also authorizes the President to mint coins, and
a lacuna in that law is the basis for the current confusion over
whether platinum coins are different. (They aren't.) Setting that aside, however,
Congress tells the President what kinds of coins can be minted, and in what amounts.
Similarly, it tells the President what bills can be printed by the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing. The President cannot, on his own authority, print more money.
This means that printing illegal currency would be both illegal (which is unsurprising, given that this entire analysis springs from asking what the President should do, when he has only illegal choices) and economically dangerous. On Tuesday, I mentioned that there is also a fun logistical issue hiding in the background, which is worth thinking about here.

In the U.S. (as in all countries with modern financial systems), actual physical cash is less and less important as a means of
transacting business. Under a broad definition of the money stock (M2,
for money geeks), there is currently about $10.5 trillion
in money circulating in the U.S. Only $1.1 trillion,
or a bit more than 10%, is in the form of cash. Everything else is electronic accounting entries that everyone accepts as being money. The President's legal authority to
print limited amounts of cash is actually not part of the process of deliberately increasing or decreasing
the overall money supply, but is rather a mechanical matter of replacing old bills as they
wear out. (A one-dollar bill has a life expectancy of less than two
years.)

Suppose that the President is faced with a binding debt ceiling, and he
decides (ignoring my argument above, regarding public confidence in the value
of money) that the least bad illegal path is to issue more currency. If
the impasse lasts for a month, he might have to print about $50-$100
billion. With $100 bills being the largest currency in circulation (since
1969), and with $1 million in hundred-dollar bills weighing
about 22 pounds, $50 billion would add up to 550 tons of currency. One imagines the Treasury sending out pallets of currency to pay its bills, along the lines of the military planes that dropped billions of dollars into Iraq in 2003-04.

At this point, consider not just the sheer physical size of the mountain of money, but the scale of the effort to put that money into the hands of the government's obligees. People prefer to use direct deposit, because they need not worry about having their checks stolen from the mail. Now, we are talking about sending cash through the mail. That obviously would not work, unless we turn letter carriers into Brinks Truck drivers. It is easy to picture a new wild, wild West (yes, another reference to 60's TV), with concerns about how to guard cash suddenly becoming a major drain on the country's economic resources.

Of course, the government's obligees could agree to receive payment in other forms. They could, for example, allow the payments to be made in larger bills. Even though there is no official $1,000,000 bill, a military contractor who is owed $50 million in a given month might be willing to receive 50 illegal versions of those in a given month, rather than demanding 500,000 Benjamins (weighing half a ton).

But what could the recipient do with the million-dollar bills? The bills are illegal, so banks would have no reason to accept them. There is very little that one can do with a large-denomination bill otherwise. (Maybe buy a Slushee at the Quik-E-Mart, and ask Apu for change?) At that point, it would simply make sense for the recipient to agree to be paid later, with "real money."

When later comes, of course, the real money is as unreal as ever. People would actually be happier with non-physical money, because what really matters is being able to write checks and use credit and debit cards as usual. Moreover, this is now little more than a disguised default -- essentially the same as issuing scrip, which I discussed a bit last month (here and here). That might be clever cover, but it would not change the fundamental fact of default.

Therefore, as I described in Tuesday's post, everything becomes much easier if the Fed plays along. The Fed is the magician, creating money out of thin air. Without that sleight of hand, people are left with stacks of paper (or worse). None of the alternatives avoids default.

However, the Fed's credibility (and political independence) is on the line, because this is a magic trick that needs to be ignored to be most effective. Having the Fed act illegally -- and even worse, having it openly engage in absurd tricks, such as the Big Coin gambit -- risks making it impossible for the Fed to do its real job. That job is nothing less than making sure that the economy can function at all. Which means that the Republicans' debt ceiling brinkmanship is even crazier than it looks.

16 comments:

Money isn't magic. At least, not "magic" as in a "hocus pocus, looks like a woman was cut in half" sort of thing. Money is a means of exchange that is affected by various things. My word is not "magic" either though how much you trust it is a matter of various things, including former performance and how able I look (which can be subjective) to do the task I promised.

As with the bit about how Obama will never carry out anything in his inauguration day speech, this sort of hyperbole is tiresome. Aren't we above this sort of thing around here?

Isn't the Fed's ability to "play along" limited by its delegated authority from Congress? If the Fed accepts scrip or high denomination currency bills (or even high denomination platinum coins) or any other form of unauthorized (by Congress) deposit from the Treasury, aren't we just asking the Fed to exceed its own authority in the exact same way as the executive branch would be exceeding its Constitutional authority? Or is there any interpretation of the Fed's authorizing legislation that would allow it to "play along" in the fashion that you describe? Thank you for continuing this series of posts!

I recently worked as a law clerk for the Yap State Court (interesting, right?), so I have some familiarity with the stone money phenomenon.

What's particularly interesting is that the value of stone money is initially determined by the number of people who died retrieving it from the neighboring islands.

It's also still used today for land transactions, wedding gifts, and for restitution for a host of wrongs. Its use for land transactions is especially imporant, as land is intricately tied up in Yapese identity. A man's birthname, assigned to him by his father's sister, determines his estate and ranking within the complicated caste system.

So, while I agree that money is "magic" in some sense, it's a big oversimplification to say that the value of stone money is only "based on a group-think that allows people to say that they own something that does nothing useful, that never moves, and that might not even exist."

Stone money began as a way of quantifying courage and sacrifice, and it retains its value today by quantifying the most important parts of a rich and complex island society.

In response to curious: I'm glad you're enjoying the posts. It's been helpful to my own thinking to write them. Yes, you're exactly right about the Fed's legal limitations. That's why I said that they (like the President) would be engaging in illegal activity. Under the dire circumstances that we would be facing, however, the Fed might decide that its higher calling is to save the republic by keeping the financial system running. Still, the Fed's legal limitations are another reason that I think the President's best choice would be to issue Treasury bonds and sell them to investors, which would leave the Fed entirely out of it.

In response to Mannisto: Yours might be the most interesting comment ever! The information that you provided offers useful insights into how the group-think works in assigning values, but that is fully consistent with what I wrote (and that you quoted). I didn't say that the values were assigned randomly or without some logical justification. I only said that the stones themselves are not instrumentally useful and need not be the basis for the value system that you describe.

The professor's reply to Mannisto is not convincing though it might be helpful for clarity on what "themselves not instrumentally useful" means.

Things need not "themselves" be "instrumentally" useful for "magic" to be a bad metaphor. Money is a means of exchange and at times a symbolic instrument that provides a concrete (rather literally here) stand-in for other things. It is in that fashion instrumentally useful.

You said money is magic. Unless the word "magic" is used in an overly simplistic way, your comment is wrong.

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